Professor Cormac Taylor:

I thank the Senator for the questions. On the maximal or minimal approach, I have been funded by multiple agencies, national and international, and my consensus is that it is best when the agency is being minimal and given the maximum amount of freedom for relatively straightforward and simple funding stream approaches.

This gives the maximum flexibility to the researchers and really allows the agency to focus on research excellence rather than siloed research, in a way. That actually ties in a little bit with the parity of esteem. Really when we talk about parity of esteem we are talking about equal opportunity for the different disciplines. If one has a relatively simple and minimalist research funding structure, then one can have, for example, a principal investigator award in science, technology, engineering and maths, STEM and a principal investigator award in arts, humanities and social science, AHSS, that would reflect each other and demonstrate, through parity of esteem, equal opportunity.

It is important to point out that some subjects and some areas of research are more expensive than others. That is just the simple fact of it. A lot of the STEM research just requires more input. This does not mean that there should be more grants, but it is not necessarily a budgetary thing that is going to reflect that parity of esteem. That would be determined at the agency level. A minimalist approach that gives equal opportunities and equal funding application opportunities to each of the disciplines is, in my pretty extensive experience, probably the best way to go. I believe that the research community would largely agree with that.